How to reorder pages in a PDF

Dragging thumbnails is the quickest way to put pages in a new order in PDF by Zaweba. Pick up a page in the thumbnails panel and drop it where it belongs. For bigger jobs, Pages > Move sends chosen pages earlier, later or to a page number, and the Organise pages grid (Ctrl+Shift+O) lays the whole document out in a full window so you can rearrange it at a glance.

Pages end up in the wrong order all the time. A scanner fed a stack the wrong way round, two documents combined before anyone checked, or an appendix that should have come after the report, not before it.

Dragging pages

Press F4 if the thumbnails panel isn't showing. Find the page you want to move, drag its thumbnail up or down the strip, and let go between the two pages where it should sit. The document reorders straight away.

If several pages need to travel together, Ctrl+click to choose them, or Shift+click to choose a run, and move them with the commands below. The size slider on the panel makes thumbnails bigger or smaller, which helps when pages look alike and you need to read them to be sure.

Moving by command

Dragging gets fiddly in a long document, where the page might need to travel three hundred places. Pages > Move does it without scrolling. Choose the pages, then move them earlier, later or straight to a page number. The same commands are on the right-click menu of the thumbnails and in the command palette (Ctrl+K).

There's also a reverse command, which turns the order of the chosen pages round. That's the fix for a stack scanned last page first. Choose all the pages and reverse them in one go.

The Organise pages grid

When a document needs a real sort-out, the side strip feels cramped. Pages > Organise pages (Ctrl+Shift+O) turns the thumbnails into a full-window grid with every page command available. You see many pages at once, drag them into place, and rotate, delete or duplicate as you go. Double-click a page, or press Esc, to go back to the normal view.

It's the right place to tidy a long scan: sideways pages and blank backs are easy to spot when you can see twenty pages together.

Saving the new order

Nothing is written to the file until you save, so take a moment to scroll through and check. Each move is one undo step, so Ctrl+Z puts back the last one. Save as keeps the original untouched if you'd like both.

Some PDFs are made with permissions that forbid changes to pages. If so, the page commands say so, so you know why nothing happened.

Reordering across documents

Pages don't have to stay in one file. In the thumbnails, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy and paste pages, including into another open tab, and you can drop a PDF from your folders between two thumbnails to insert its pages right there. If you're putting a pack together from several files, File > Combine files lets you set the order of the files before they're joined, which saves rearranging afterwards.

PDF by Zaweba is free software for Windows. It works offline with no account, so your documents stay on your own computer while you put them in order.